Meeting Infinity (The Infinity Project) Read online

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  Meeting Infinity

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  Wings of Fire

  First published 2015 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Cover by Dominic Harman

  Selection and “Introduction” Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Strahan.

  “Memento Mori” Copyright © 2015 by Madeline Ashby.

  “My Last Bringback” Copyright © 2015 by John Barnes.

  “Aspects” Copyright © 2015 by Gregory Benford.

  “Rates of Change” Copyright © 2015 by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

  “In Blue Lily’s Wake” Copyright © 2015 by Aliette de Bodard.

  “Body Politic” Copyright © 2015 by Kameron Hurley.

  “Drones” Copyright © 2015 by Simon Ings.

  “Emergence” Copyright © 2015 by Gwyneth Jones.

  “Cocoons” Copyright © 2015 by Nancy Kress.

  “The Cold Inequalities” Copyright © 2015 by Yoon Ha Lee.

  “The Falls: A Luna Story” Copyright © 2015 by Ian McDonald.

  “Exile from Extinction” Copyright © 2015 by Ramez Naam.

  “Outsider” Copyright © 2015 by An Owomoyela.

  “Desert Lexicon” Copyright © 2015 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

  “Pictures from the Resurrection” Copyright © 2015 by Bruce Sterling.

  “All the Wrong Places” Copyright © 2015 by Sean Williams.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-922-1

  For Sofa Mission Control Commander Pat Cadigan,

  who always has her controls set for the heart of the sun,

  with thanks for the stories so far

  and in anticipation of the stories to come...

  THIS IS THE fourth volume in the ‘Infinity’ series of anthologies. Like each of them, it’s had its challenges. I’d like to thank my agent Howard Morhaim for his hard work and support during another busy year together, my editor Jonathan Oliver and the fantastic team at Solaris (Ben, David and Lydia) for their care, dedication and passion for this book, and of course all of the contributors, who sent such wonderful stories. Special thanks to John, Ian and Sean for coming through at the very last moment, when I really needed it.

  I’d also like to thank my wife Marianne, and my two daughters, who help me make time each day to work on my editorial projects.

  Introduction, Jonathan Strahan

  Rates of Change, James S.A. Corey

  Desert Lexicon, Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Drones, Simon Ings

  Body Politic, Kameron Hurley

  Cocoons, Nancy Kress

  Emergence, Gwyneth Jones

  The Cold Inequalities, Yoon Ha Lee

  Pictures From the Resurrection, Bruce Sterling

  Aspects, Gregory Benford

  Memento Mori, Madeline Ashby

  All the Wrong Places, Sean Williams

  In Blue Lily’s Wake, Aliette de Bodard

  Exile From Extinction, Ramez Naam

  My Last Bringback, John Barnes

  Oustider, An Owomoyela

  The Falls: A Luna Story, Ian McDonald

  About the Authors

  Also From Solaris

  FUTURE SHOCK IS the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

  – Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

  THERE ONCE WAS a Golden Age science fiction writer named Jack Williamson who was born in Arizona in the United States in 1908, back before it was a state and was still called the Arizona Territory. When his family, who were farmers and ranchers, needed better pastures for their herds, they packed up in horse-drawn covered wagons and moved to New Mexico.

  During his lifetime – he lived to be 98 – Williamson saw first electricity then telephones arrive in his town. His parents’ horse-drawn wagons gave way to cars. Before his fiftieth birthday humans had flown as high and as fast as they yet have, and not long after his sixtieth birthday they would walk on the moon. Within a few years of that the first successful human heart transplant would be performed, and it would not be long really before corneal transplants were commonplace.

  Then things got really crazy. Consider this: not too long ago, as I write, I watched a doctor 3D print a human kidney while presenting a talk to a TED seminar, and when an astronaut on the International Space Station didn’t have the correct tool to fix a problem, it was emailed to him (he printed out the socket set and made the repairs successfully).

  The point of all of this is simple, and is manifold. To live to be nearly a hundred years old is amazing, though less unusual than it once was, but the fact that Williamson probably saw more rapid, widespread technological change during his lifetime than at any other time in human history is even more incredible. The 20th century was a time of incredible feats of technological achievement, but it was also a time of intense challenge and hardship, struggle and violence, much of which was precipitated by the very change that seemed so miraculous. It was both the most innovative and most potentially destructive of times, when we could find the skill to eradicate a disease and the stupidity to let it recur, and when we could build devices that could end all life on our planet using power sources that could possibly make us immortal.

  Fifteen years into the 21st century the idea of future shock seems so obsolete and meaningless. We live in a world where easily accessible fossil fuels are disappearing, where the climate is changing in ways that are both violent and dangerous, and technology changes so quickly that change is the new norm. Being future shocked is so much a part of day-to-day life, at least in the West, that we don’
t even notice it (the future, of course, is unevenly distributed, so this does vary significantly across the face of the planet). Alvin Toffler, who wrote Future Shockalmost half a century ago also wrote that, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”, which may be the truest thing in his book.

  For all that the 20th century was a time of intense change, and the early 21st century seems to be an even more giddy, glorious, terrifying, appalling example of the same, it seems reasonable to say that we stand on the precipice of the greatest period of change humanity will ever see (this may well always be true from now on). The next hundred years or so will see climate addressed as a problem, or not; will see humans walk on another planet, or not; will see our society address problems of scarcity and injustice, or not. And the technological changes that will solve those problems will arrive, or not. And if they do, we cannot predict what impact they will have.

  And that’s a little of what Meeting Infinity–the fourth book in the ‘Infinity Project’ series of anthologies – attempts to address. When I was casting around for the subject for the next ‘Infinity’ book I remembered Jack Williamson, the only person I know of who both wrote science fiction and travelled out West in a covered wagon, and the theme seemed clear to me. So, I asked a group of science fiction writers to think about the ways in which profound change might impact on us in the future, how humanity might have to change physically and psychologically, to meet the challenges that may be thrown at us in the next fifty, the next hundred, and the next five hundred years and beyond. And they came back to me with visions that are broad and varied, fractured and strange. The stories you’re about to read show humanity triumphant and humanity desperately on the run; they show a world we’d recognize and some we can barely contemplate; they have people who are uploaded, downloaded, hacked, recovered, infected by viruses and saved by them; they introduce us to people who could have walked down the street with the young Jack Williamson, and to people who would seem out of place in even his wildest stories. They show, more than anything, how we might meet infinity and survive it.

  In 1985 singer songwriter Paul Simon flew to South Africa where he recorded “The Boy in the Bubble”, probably the most prescient song of his career. Set partly on the outskirts of a parched town, soldiers are killed by bombs left in baby carriages, surveillance is everywhere, miracles like a boy with a baboon heart are commonplace, and lasers flash in the jungle, he leaves us with a line that echoes into the future: “These are the days of miracle and wonder, Don’t cry baby, don’t cry”. Hopefully Meeting Infinity and the stories in it gives us a glimpse of both the darkness and the possible joy the future might offer.

  JONATHAN STRAHAN

  Perth, Western Australia

  March, 2015

  DIANA HASN’T SEEN her son naked before. He floats now in the clear gel bath of the medical bay, the black ceramic casing that holds his brain, the long articulated tail of his spinal column. Like a tadpole, she thinks. Like something young. In all, he hardly masses more than he did as a baby. She has a brief, horrifying image of holding him on her lap, cradling the braincase to her breast, the whip of his spine curling around her.

  The thin white filaments of interface neurons hang in the translucent gel, too thin to see except in aggregate. Silvery artificial blood runs into the casing ports and back out in tubes more slender than her pinky finger. She thought, when they called her in, that she’d be able to see the damage. That there would be a scratch on the carapace, a wound, something to show where the violence had been done to him. There is nothing there. Not so much as a scuff mark. No evidence.

  The architecture of the medical center is designed to reassure her. The walls curve around her in warm colors. The air recyclers hum a low, consonant chord. Nothing helps. Her own body – her third – is flushed with adrenaline, her heart aches and her hands squeeze into fists. Her fight or flight reaction has no outlet, so it speeds around her body, looking for a way to escape. The chair tilts too easily under her, responding to shifts in her balance and weight that she isn’t aware of making. She hates it. The café au lait that the nurse brought congeals, ignored, on the little table.

  Diana stares at the curve and sweep of Stefan’s bodiless nervous system as if by watching him now she can stave off the accident that has already happened. Closing the barn door, she thinks, after the horses are gone. The physician ghosts in behind her, footsteps quiet as a cat’s, his body announcing his presence only in how he blocks the light.

  “Mrs. Dalkin,” he says. “How are you feeling?”

  “How is he?” she demands instead of saying hello.

  The physician is a large man, handsome with a low warm voice like flannel fresh from the dryer. She wonders if it is his original body or if he’s chosen the combination of strength and softness just to make this part of his work easier. “Active. We’re seeing metabolic activity over most of his brain the way we would hope. Now that he’s here, the inflammation is under control.”

  “So he’s going to be all right?”

  He hesitates. “We’re still a little concerned about the interface. There was some bruising that may have impaired his ability to integrate with a new body, but we can’t really know the extent of that yet.”

  Diana leans forward, her gut aching. Stefan is there, only inches from her. Awake, trapped in darkness, aware only of himself and the contents of his own mind. He doesn’t even know she is watching him. If she picked him up, he wouldn’t know she was doing it. If she shouted, he wouldn’t hear. What if he is trapped that way forever? What if he has fallen into a darkness she can never bring him out from?

  “Is he scared?”

  “We are seeing some activity in his amygdala, yes,” the physician says. “We’re addressing that chemically, but we don’t want to depress his neural activity too much right now.”

  “You want him scared, then.”

  “We want him active,” the physician says. “Once we can establish some communication with him and let him know that we’re here and where he is and that we’re taking action on his behalf, I expect most of his agitation will resolve.”

  “So he doesn’t even know he’s here.”

  “The body he was in didn’t survive the initial accident. He was extracted in situ before transport.” He says it so gently, it sounds like an apology. An offer of consolation. She feels a spike of hatred and rage for the man run through her like an electric shock, but she hides it.

  “What happened?”

  “Excuse me?” the physician asks.

  “I said, what happened? How did he get hurt? Who did this?”

  “He was brought from the coast by emergency services. I understood it was an accident. Someone ran into him, or he ran into something, but apart from that it was a blunt force injury, we didn’t. . .”

  Diana lifts her hand, and the physician falls silent. “Can you fix him? You can make him all right.”

  “We have a variety of interventions at our disposal,” he says, relieved to be back on territory he knows. “It’s really going to depend on the nature of the damage he’s sustained.”

  “What’s the worst case?”

  “The worst case is that he won’t be able to interface with a new body at all.”

  She turns to look into the physician’s eyes. The dark brown that looks back at her doesn’t show anything of the cruelty or horror of what he’s just said. “How likely is that?” Diana says, angry at her voice for shaking.

  “Possible. But Stefan is young. His tissue is resilient. The casing wasn’t breached, and the constriction site on his spine didn’t buckle. I’d say his chances are respectable, but we won’t know for a few days.”

  Diana drops her head into her hands, the tips of her fingers digging into her temples. Something violent bubbles in her chest, and a harsh laughter presses at the back of her throat like vomit.

  “All right,” she says. “All. . . right.”
>
  She hears Karlo’s footsteps, recognizing their cadence the way she would have known his cough or the sound of his yawn. Even across bodies, there is a constancy about Karlo. She both clings to it now and resents it. The ridiculous muscle-bound body he bought himself for retirement tips into the doorway, darkening the room.

  “I came when I heard,” he says.

  “Fuck you,” Diana says, and then the tears come and won’t stop.

  He puts his arms around her. The doctor walks softly away.

  IT IS A year earlier, and Karlo says “He’s a grown man. There’s no reason he shouldn’t.”

  The house looks out over the hot concrete of Dallas. It is smaller than the one they’d shared in Quebec, the kitchen thinner, the couch less comfortable. They way they live in it is different too. Before, when they’d had a big family room, they would all stretch out together on long evenings. Stefan talking to his friends and playing games, Karlo building puzzles or doing office work, Diana watching old films and taking meetings with work groups in Europe and Asia. They’d been a family then – husband, wife, child. For all their tensions and half-buried resentments, they’d still been a unit, the three of them. But they live in the Dallas house like it is a dormitory, coming back to sleep and leaving again when they wake. Even her.